Another weekend has come and gone and I don't know what happened! Between assignments, organizing PDs and work, things are really starting to pile up. I hit a breaking point and decided I needed to break down and purchase an agenda today. However, just as I decided to do so, a buddy of mine informed me that I walk around with a $500 agenda in my pocket everyday and so I ended up spending the better part of my afternoon putting my life onto Google Calendar on my iPhone. As a result I am no further ahead with my assignments than I was this morning, but I AM more organized. Whether or not that will pay off in the long run, has yet to be seen.
Moving along, looking back at my past week in the schools, I can relate several scenarios I experienced with what Gallagher talks about in his book. The particular instance of the book that I am referring to right now is the portion that talks about student comprehension and confusion in regards to reading. At the start of an ELA 9 class last week I was asked by the teacher to work with one of the students who had fallen behind in order to help them catch up to the rest of the class. Once we began to work on some of the assigned questions however, it was clear that the student was very unfamiliar with the story and did not understand what had taken place in the story. Coming up with answers to the questions was next to impossible for the student and he quickly looked to me to provide him with the answers rather than looking to the text of the story for his response. The importance of a second reading proved to be very relevant in this scenario. However, because he DID he read the story the previous day, I decided it could be the case that there were merely PARTS of the story that he may not have understood. To get his answers, I helped guide him to specific paragraphs and have him reread it. After doing so, we went over what he read together in order to better determine what happened. After completing this activity, the student was able to come up with relevant answers to the questions without having to reread the entire story again.
Sunday, 21 October 2012
Monday, 15 October 2012
Better Late than Never?
The regularity with which I have been composing these blogs has thus far left something to be desired. That changes today. I am on top of it from here on out! A lot has happened over the past couple of weeks in regards to both the EDUC 498 class, readings and of course, the field experience that ties it all together.
So, I suppose I will begin with a bit of an overview Kelly Gallagher's Deeper Reading: Chapter two and three. Gallagher provides a lot of information that outlines the importance of "framing the text" prior to teaching the work to students. Getting students to think about a personal story that will apply to what they are about to read will automatically engage them in the material. Framing the text may also provide the students with a more valuable perspective from which to examine the text as they read.
I had the chance to doing a bit of "framing" this past week at Evan Hardy. One of the teachers there provided me with the opportunity to formulate an informal lesson to students. My contribution was required to help transition the students towards their next topic of study; Pierre Trudeau. Because the class is a Native Studies 30 course, I had to keep the subject matter closely tied to issues surrounding First Nations. To get the students motivated about my lesson, I first posed questions to the classroom asking them whether anyone had been to a reserve and what they thought of them. This generated a lot of passionate discussion. By the time I got to speaking about the "White Paper" and the threat that this document posed to not only reserves but treaties in general, the students were actively engaged in the lesson at hand. In this scenario, Gallagher's "framing" strategy worked better than I could have imagined and it definitely made my first lesson at my partner school a success.
Appleman's text talked a lot about student perspective and the impact this has on how students will read a particular text. Each student's unique background provides different individual meanings for each student. In class we had a chance to put this idea to the text following having watched an extravagant advertisement for Pantene. Because I am something of a musician, I looked at the video from a performer's point of view and the satisfaction she would have received from her performance at the end of the clip. A female classmate looked at the video as though the focus was empowering women. Empowering women is a valid motive behind the video as well, however I did not even pick up on that. As a male student, my personal perspective did not pick up on that as a primary purpose of the video. Food for thought.
That's all folks.
So, I suppose I will begin with a bit of an overview Kelly Gallagher's Deeper Reading: Chapter two and three. Gallagher provides a lot of information that outlines the importance of "framing the text" prior to teaching the work to students. Getting students to think about a personal story that will apply to what they are about to read will automatically engage them in the material. Framing the text may also provide the students with a more valuable perspective from which to examine the text as they read.
I had the chance to doing a bit of "framing" this past week at Evan Hardy. One of the teachers there provided me with the opportunity to formulate an informal lesson to students. My contribution was required to help transition the students towards their next topic of study; Pierre Trudeau. Because the class is a Native Studies 30 course, I had to keep the subject matter closely tied to issues surrounding First Nations. To get the students motivated about my lesson, I first posed questions to the classroom asking them whether anyone had been to a reserve and what they thought of them. This generated a lot of passionate discussion. By the time I got to speaking about the "White Paper" and the threat that this document posed to not only reserves but treaties in general, the students were actively engaged in the lesson at hand. In this scenario, Gallagher's "framing" strategy worked better than I could have imagined and it definitely made my first lesson at my partner school a success.
Appleman's text talked a lot about student perspective and the impact this has on how students will read a particular text. Each student's unique background provides different individual meanings for each student. In class we had a chance to put this idea to the text following having watched an extravagant advertisement for Pantene. Because I am something of a musician, I looked at the video from a performer's point of view and the satisfaction she would have received from her performance at the end of the clip. A female classmate looked at the video as though the focus was empowering women. Empowering women is a valid motive behind the video as well, however I did not even pick up on that. As a male student, my personal perspective did not pick up on that as a primary purpose of the video. Food for thought.
That's all folks.
Wednesday, 26 September 2012
New Directions
It's been an interesting week for all the right reasons. I started my student teaching at a great school: Evan Hardy Collegiate, or as some of the teachers call it; "Heaven Hardy Collegiate". I feel like such sentiments can mean nothing but good things. Although teaching experiences have been thus far limited, I have had a great deal of interaction with the students through aiding them with whatever I can when the students need help. I feel like the readings that we looked at in class for this week will aid me in understanding how to improve my lessons when I finally do get more into the teaching mode for some of the classes that I am observing.
A particularly interesting concept that I have had on my mind a great deal this week is that of the effect that certain perspectives have on the messages that novels portray to the reader. I have always been certain that as a teacher, I would want to use Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in my classroom, not only because I am passionate about the novel, but because I feel it teaches very important social and historical lessons to students. I still do feel that this is true, but after reading the second chapter in "Critical Encounters", I feel that the point of view of Huckleberry Finn may not be the most effective perspective for all students. Especially in a multicultural classroom, perspectives on racism from a young, white male may not be respected as well as those that come from a person of a more marginalized background. I acknowledge for the first time that there may be more effective novels with more authentic perspectives on racism that ALL students would be able to more easily identify with. This is certainly not to say that I do not plan to include Huck Finn in my future lesson plans. But I will be more mindful of the potential for other texts to be more effective based on the point of view from which it is told.
The other text that I had to chance to look at was "Deeper Reading" by Kelly Gallagher. The first chapter turned out to be exactly my type of textbook reading: short and large font size... and not entirely uninteresting either. The chapter emphasized the importance of TEACHING challenging reading to students rather than ASSIGNING it. Students need to be taught to pull the deeper meanings out of novels in order to truly appreciate them. It seems that effective reading is a critical life skill that escaping more and more of our youth. I feel that there is some truth in this claim following this week when I had the opportunity to sit in on a couple of ELA 9 classes. Teacher opinions and my own observations agreed that the students seemed to have reading comprehension levels that were behind grade 9 levels. It will be interesting to track their improvement over the course of the coming months.
A particularly interesting concept that I have had on my mind a great deal this week is that of the effect that certain perspectives have on the messages that novels portray to the reader. I have always been certain that as a teacher, I would want to use Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in my classroom, not only because I am passionate about the novel, but because I feel it teaches very important social and historical lessons to students. I still do feel that this is true, but after reading the second chapter in "Critical Encounters", I feel that the point of view of Huckleberry Finn may not be the most effective perspective for all students. Especially in a multicultural classroom, perspectives on racism from a young, white male may not be respected as well as those that come from a person of a more marginalized background. I acknowledge for the first time that there may be more effective novels with more authentic perspectives on racism that ALL students would be able to more easily identify with. This is certainly not to say that I do not plan to include Huck Finn in my future lesson plans. But I will be more mindful of the potential for other texts to be more effective based on the point of view from which it is told.
The other text that I had to chance to look at was "Deeper Reading" by Kelly Gallagher. The first chapter turned out to be exactly my type of textbook reading: short and large font size... and not entirely uninteresting either. The chapter emphasized the importance of TEACHING challenging reading to students rather than ASSIGNING it. Students need to be taught to pull the deeper meanings out of novels in order to truly appreciate them. It seems that effective reading is a critical life skill that escaping more and more of our youth. I feel that there is some truth in this claim following this week when I had the opportunity to sit in on a couple of ELA 9 classes. Teacher opinions and my own observations agreed that the students seemed to have reading comprehension levels that were behind grade 9 levels. It will be interesting to track their improvement over the course of the coming months.
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